Graffiti in the death strip: the Berlin wall's first street artist tells his story

Graffiti in the death strip: the Berlin wall's first street artist tells his story

Thierry Noir was the first to daub the ultimate symbol of communist repression with cartoonish graffiti, and his creations became world famous. Here, he talks about playing cat and mouse with the death strip guards, meeting Wim Wenders, and what happened when the wall came down

A patrol of the Grepos (or border police) of the GDR on the 'death strip' between the two walls, the border of East and West Berlin. I took this from the window of the squat I lived in for 20 years. Nothing really happened at the Berlin Wall. There were no cars, no shops, no noises. I never saw any 'actions' with the Grepos, never saw any soldiers shooting at anybody.

This elephant was one of my first paintings on the Berlin Wall. I started painting outside because I wanted to say that it's good to put art in the streets and not solely in museums and galleries. At the time my influences were everyone from Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, plus musicians like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin and Nina Hagen. This painting represented the key to success – heavy work every day. If you wait at home for inspiration, you can wait a very long time.

This is me painting the wall along Waldemarstrasse in Kreuzberg in 1985. The dinosaurs represent a mutation of nature – because the Berlin Wall and the paintings I created were like a mutation of culture. Where else to find kilometres of painted concrete wall in Europe other than in West Berlin? I used to paint the Wall every day. All my ideas came to me not from the head to the hand but from the hand to the head. From the beginning, we used to collect leftover paint and materials from the renovation of houses in Kreuzberg. We made do with whatever we could find. We had no money to buy materials.

A homage to Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 New York exhibition and the enormous scandal provoked by him exhibiting a urinal. I put this up in April 1984, shortly after I started to paint the Wall. A few days later I also showed a hand basin.

My early paintings on the Wall were very different to my later style. My style changed out of necessity, because every day hundreds of people would come up to me and ask me questions. So I had to adapt to be quicker, which became my Fast Form Manifesto. The Fast Form Manifesto is a good recipe for people who have to paint fast in dangerous environments, or with constantly interruptions. You need two ideas and three colours. It was a way for me to show people that this mythical wall was not built for ever and could be changed.

This is a collaboration with Christophe Bouchet, a remake of the Tortoise and the Hare fable. In our version, the hare wins. Bouchet's piece was called Homage to La Fontaine, after the most famous French fabulist. Mine was called Red Dope on Rabbits. We painted these on 13 August 1985, for the 24th anniversary of the construction of the Wall. I met Christophe Bouchet in Berlin in 1982. He used to paint on the city's main avenue, Kurfürstendamm. At the end of 1982, he moved into my squat. From that point on we worked together on the Wall.

This portrait was taken in 1986 by my first wife Gabi. I was wearing a suit that day that I found in a bag of old clothes on the street. At that time, West Berliners often left furnishings and clothes on the streets to recycle. I would paint the Wall all day then travel to the centre of West Berlin to sell canvases in restaurants. That is how I survived back then.